Astronomers now have the dumbest possible name for a moon – BGR



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If you're gonna go up at the night sky there's a good chance you'll spot Earth's only wide natural satellite. We just called it "the Moon," but other planets have moons too. Recently, the first evidence of an exomoon – that is, a moon orbiting a planet in another star system – was revealed, but what if we found a planet with a moon that had a moon of its own?

This paper has been compiled by several astronomers who have taken it upon themselves to come up with their own terminology to describe these as-of-yet-undiscovered objects. The best (or worst?) Name candidate is so silly that it's already taken by the internet: Moon-moons.

As ScienceAlert explains, all the discussion about the moons of the past. The first is the work of the astrophysicist Duncan Forgan who took the time to calculate the exoplanet candidate Kepler-1625b could potentially be habitable.

In the paper, Forgan explains that while current observations of the potential exomoon suggest it would not reside within the star's livable zone. However, if the wide, Neptune-sized moon had a moon of its own, and if that moon was a rocky body like Earth, it could have been habitable when Kepler-1625 was in its main sequence long ago.

That's where we get to the heart of the issue. As Forgan describes the potential of a moon moon, moon moon moon moon moon moon moon moon moon moon moon moon moon moon moon was the result of one of those terrible "What's your ______ name?" posts that you want to give you a new nickname based on the first letters of your first and last name. In this particular case, the individual's "Werewolf Name" ended up being Moon Moon.

Internet culture aside, the research is quite interesting, and has a paper that surfaced a few days later. Juna Kollmeier and Sean Raymond prefer "submoon" instead – the scientists describe how it might actually be possible. Both papers are worth a read, but we will have to wait and see.

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